The living room was crowded. Sophie perched on the sectional arm, beaming. Jen leaning in the kitchen doorway. And at the island, grinning like he'd just executed a heist, was Tom.
"Hey, stranger." He crossed to her and took the bags. "Surprise."
She hugged him. "Why didn't you tell me? How long can you stay?"
"Weekend at least. Maybe longer if things stay quiet." He kissed her forehead. "Moved some showings around. You've been handling the contracts and listings from here, so I figured the team could spare me for a few days."
Sophie launched into a recap of her first day—Diane, the training, the reservation system, the news that Ethan had gotten hired at the same restaurant. Tom listened, asked questions, laughed where appropriate. He slipped into the space without effort, as he always did.
The evening unfolded easily. Pizza from DeNunzio's, eaten on the deck while the sky cycled through its colors. The teenagers scattered to their corners of the house. The adults lingered with drinks, conversation moving comfortably among people who knew each other well.
Tom sat beside Meredith on the loveseat, his hand on her knee. A story about work—a client who'd lowballed an offer, then acted shocked when the sellers countered at full ask—and everyone was laughing.
Meredith laughed too. She'd always been able to do that, even when her mind was elsewhere.
Later, after the deck emptied and Meredith stood alone at the railing, she let herself feel what she'd pushed down since walking through the door.
She'd been different here. Easier. She hadn't realized how much until Tom appeared in the kitchen and she felt herself pulling back into the familiar shape.
She loved him. That wasn't in question.
What unsettled her was harder to name. A restlessness she couldn't explain. Someone she'd started becoming here, in these few days, who didn't quite fit the contours of her marriage.
The pool glowed below. Beyond the dunes, the ocean kept its steady pull. Inside, Tom was asking Carrie about the farmer's market, his voice drifting through the screen door.
Meredith stayed at the railing until her breathing slowed.
It didn't disappear entirely. She hadn't expected it to.
She went inside. Kissed her husband. Pretended she wasn't still trying to understand what any of it meant.
CHAPTER FIVE
The address Marge had given her led inland, away from the salt air and the endless blue, through streets that traded beach houses for gas stations and shopping plazas before opening into something else entirely. Farmland. Actual farmland, twenty minutes from the ocean, stretching flat and green under the morning sky.
Saltmeadow Farm announced itself with a hand-painted sign at the entrance and rows of vegetables running in long parallel lines toward a red barn in the distance. An old split-rail fence marked the boundary between the dirt road and the fields beyond.
Carrie turned off the engine and sat for a moment, wondering what she was doing here.
The girls hadn't wanted to come. Brittany had an afternoon shift at the beach club and was using the morning to sleep in. Ava had barely looked up from the book she'd been reading on the deck—some fantasy novel with a cracked spine that she'd already made it halfway through, her camera resting on the chair beside her. "I'm good," she'd said, and that had been that. Carrie had learned not to push.
So she'd come alone. Which was maybe the point.
Inside the farm's entrance, a wooden stand displayed jars of honey and bundles of herbs tied with twine. A mutt lifted its head from a patch of shade, assessed Carrie as non-threatening, and lowered it again.
Beyond the stand, the farm opened up. Rows and rows of vegetables stretched toward the tree line—leafy greens in one section, tomato plants staked and heavy with fruit in another, squash vines sprawling across the soil. A pair of white hoop houses stood to the left, their plastic sides rolled up to let the breeze through, and beyond them a greenhouse with fogged glass caught the morning light. To the right, a red barn anchored the property, its doors thrown open to reveal stacked crates and the organized chaos of a working farm. A chicken coop sat beside it, and a dozen hens pecked at the dirt nearby, unbothered by anything. The whole place smelled like soil and growth, and Carrie couldn't remember the last time she'd slowed down enough to notice.
Near the greenhouse, a woman in rubber boots and a straw hat was loading crates onto a flatbed cart.
"Carrie?" The woman straightened, tipped back her hat. It was Marge, braid tucked over one shoulder, dirt on her knees. "You came."
"I came." Carrie was still taking it in—the scope of it, the life everywhere she looked. "This is incredible."
"Still surprises me some days." Marge wiped her hands on her jeans and gestured for Carrie to follow. "Let me show you around."
They walked the perimeter first. Up close, the farm revealed itself in layers. Marge pointed out the shaded beds where lettuce and arugula thrived in the cooler soil, the drip lines running between pepper plants, the marigolds planted at the end of each row to keep the pests away. She explained the rotation schedule, the irrigation system her husband Frank had rigged up thirty years ago that still worked better than anything modern, the way certain plants protected others when you put them side by side. Companion planting, she called it. Carrie liked the sound of that.
"Most people think farming is about putting seeds in the ground and waiting," Marge said, stopping beside a row of pepper plants heavy with fruit. "It's not. It's about paying attention. Reading what the soil tells you, what the leaves tell you. The plants will show you what they need if you know how to look."
